2011-09-06

QRCodes, Augmented Reality, ARK, Unity and the iPad

Stuart Eve here in CASA has been working away in the Unity gaming engine in terms of Augmented Reality applications for the iPhone and iPad. As Stewart himself notes it is surprisingly successful and with at least 3 different ways of getting 3D content to overlay on the iOS video feed (Qualcomm, StringAR and UART). He has been attempting to load 3D content at runtime, so that dynamic situations can be created as a result of user interaction – rather than having to have all of the resources (3D models, etc.) pre-loaded into the app. This not only saves on file size of the app, it also means that the app can pull real-time information and data that can be changed by many people at once.

The preliminary results can be seen in the video below, linked to the Archaeological Recording Kit (ARK)

This example uses the Qualcomm AR API, and ARK v1.0. Obviously at the moment it is marker-based AR (or at least image recognition based), the next task is to incorporate the iDevices’ gyroscope to enable the AR experience to continue even when the QR code is not visible.

It is well worth keeping a watch on Stuarts blog for further updates....